Three ways to revive a damaged disk

By Bob LeVitus

April 30, 2018

I have more hard drives than most people. That means I also have more hard drive failures than most people.

For as long as I can remember I’ve relied upon the same three products when my hard (or solid state) disks go bad: Apple’s Disk Utility (free), Prosoft Engineering’s Drive Genius ($79), and Alsoft’s DiskWarrior ($119.99).

When a disk fails or acts wonky — by not mounting when it should, or by disappearing from the desktop when it shouldn’t — the first thing I try is Disk Utility’s First Aid.

First, it’s the only one of the three that doesn’t require you to boot from a different disk to repair your startup disk (macOS High Sierra only). Second, who knows more about repairing a damaged Mac disk than Apple? And third, it’s free, and you know how much I love free solutions.

If First Aid fails, I then try one of my third-party tools.

Until recently, I’d have told you it was a three-way tie, with each of the three resolving roughly one-third of my disk issues.

But since the beginning of this year I’ve had at least three disk failures that only one of the three could repair.

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Drive Genius had a different alert I also don’t recall seeing before: “Cannot Mount Drive. ‘The Other Drobo’ is either not formatted or is a system owned drive that should not be used.”

At this point, my only option appeared to be to erase (reformat) the recalcitrant disks. Instead, I tried DiskWarrior, which repaired the damaged disk directories in about 30 minutes.

The biggest benefit was that I didn’t lose half a day erasing and restoring disks and was back to work in half an hour.

So, in the past few months I have had three disks that Disk Utility and Drive Genius could not repair but DiskWarrior could. (For what it's worth, all three have performed flawlessly since their repair).

Does that mean you shouldn’t try Disk Utility’s First Aid or buy Drive Genius?

Absolutely not. Disk Utility is faster, easier and free. If it works, you’ve saved time and money.

Drive Genius has many other disk analysis and maintenance options, including Find Duplicates, Clone, Defragment, and Malware Scan, that are not available in the others.

DiskWarrior is a one-trick pony, but that pony can often repair damaged hard (or solid-state) disks the other apps can’t. So, in my opinion, DiskWarrior is the one to get if you’re only going to get one.

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